Meme

[eve11]

Ah, also, I think I want to start sixathon sign-ups this weekend? Or maybe next week sometime.

In the meantime, a meme about writing, snagged from various folks (nonelvis, lost_spook, doctorpancakes among others):

Give me a number and I'll answer the question (or try to anyway):

1. Which is your favorite of the fics you’ve written for [name of fandom]?
2. Favorite piece overall?
3. Which was the hardest to write, in terms of plot?
4. Which has the most “you” in it, however you’d define that?
5. What is an image/set of images that you’re particularly proud of?
6. Idea that you always wanted to write but could never make work?
7. Least favorite plot point/chapter/moment?
8. Favorite plot point/chapter/moment?
9. Favorite character to write?
10. Favorite line or lines of dialogue that you’ve written
11. If I’m showing off just one of your pieces to someone, which one should it be?
12. What WIPs do you have going now? Are you excited about them?
13. Are there any things that might have happened in any of your stories, but you changed them at the last minute? (So-and-so dies, they don’t actually kiss, main character has long extended ballet-based dream sequence, etc.)
14. Would you want to write canon for any of your fandoms (like be hired by showrunner to do an episode)? Which one?
15. Does font matter to you when you’re writing a draft?
16. 3 favorite comments ever received on fanfic.
17. Any mean comments? How’d you deal with it? Who laid the smackdown?
18. If you could go back and revise one of your older stories, which would it be?
19. Do you make up scenes at work/on the bus/at the gym? Who are the characters that pop up the most? Do you write them down?
20. Go nuts, and talk about writing. Or write me a little ficlet-whatsit using a character/image/line I shall now specify—

Comments

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

2, 4, 6?

[eve11]

2: I may have to get back to you on that one, wow. Pretty sure I can say it will be the WIP-o-Doom once it is done. But for finished stories... aaah, I like them all for different reasons. It's a bit rough around the edges but I still quite like Veil, my 2005 Stargate Team Ficathon entry. Do I like it more than any of my Doctor Who stuff? Ummm... I don't know?

4: The most "me", hm. Probably On the Study of Shatter-Resistant Materials, not for Peri's particular backstory (although my grandmother always did get me dolls that I never played with for christmas and birthdays), but because it's a mix of math and life, and just a bit feminist around the edges.

6: Mostly Farscape stories. The one where the end of season 3 ignites all-out Scarran-Peacekeeper war, and Scorpius flees with Stark and an injured Crichton to the depths of a cold Kalish outpost in Scarran space. The one where Crichton really does kill Aeryn at the end of season 4 (instead of her bioloid) and ends up on a floating mine city above a planet choked with ash and dust.

Doctor Who: The one where Ursula's storyline from Love and Monsters actually makes any sense whatsoever, and she gets a second chance. The one where the TARDIS core-dumps herself into the Doctor in order to survive... Gaiman got that one written before I managed to go beyond a few ideas. There was a maze planet with Ten and Martha.

There are a lot of stories that I can see bits and pieces of in my head, but I am not very disciplined at writing long stories, which is why I can't make them work very well.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Yay for mixing math and life and feminism! And a maze planet with Ten and Martha sounds really neat! :)

[eve11]

I don't even know if I have the file for the Ten and Martha in the Maze fic, although I think I put a snippet of it into a WIP meme about four years ago :)

[honeynoir.livejournal.com]

11?

[eve11]

Hmmm... I think Home Field Advantage because I probably spent the most time on getting it just right, as it was a piece for the Short Trips contest. And it's relatively short, and tries to tell a sci-fi story that the Doctor and Turlough are just passing through.

[honeynoir.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was a good story, and one I'd missed!

[eve11]

Thanks! :)

[thisbluespirit]

15 & 16. :-)

[eve11]

15: I was going to say no but actually I think it does! I hate Times New Roman. I use text editors to write stories with HTML italics (and tables) when needed, as if I would just cut and paste into LJ. So I like fixed width fonts like Courier, or the Arial sans serif that is the default for the Mac TextEdit utility. Yes, fonts do indeed matter.

16: elliptic_eye said of The Chinese Remainder Theorem, "That kite up in the sky is Six for me," which was sweet because I'd not even thought of it that way. And she also said of On the Study of Shatter-Resistant Materials (which I did write for her prompt, I admit) that it "might just be the most justice Peri has ever gotten in or out of canon," which was very sweet.

And an old one, on my Farscape Magnum Opus A Sci-Fi Original lizamanynames nailed what I was going for: It's everything I love about Farscape does everything I hate about the rest of TV, and does it better.

[thisbluespirit]

Maybe 15 is an odd question, but it interests me, because of late, I've found it does matter to me - and I've always been the sort of person who only writes story x in that pen and story y in the other...

Aww. Lovely reviews make the world go round - or, at least, the fanfic writer keep writing. :-)

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

Number 10, if you please. :)

[eve11]

I think part 5 of my current WIP has some good Eleven and River dialogue. From what's posted, I am pretty proud of Six and Mel in SCRUPLES, especially:
--
If only Webster had included definitions for 24th century Official Anglicanized versions of the Quenouille Replicants' third gender pronoun, he would have had a fantastic seven-letter word. Instead he eyed the game board, then plucked a single tile off his rack, lighting it on a triple letter score.

U T

"Oot?" Mel asked.

"'Uht'. Four points."

"Dare I ask?"

The Doctor fished the last tile out of the bag. "First note in the French system of musical scale solmization, still used by a few theorists in the more strict Jesuit seminaries, but generally abandoned in favor of Solfeggio's do."

"'Ut, a deer', eh?"

"Why, thank you."

Mel looked up from her tiles. The Doctor smiled smugly.

"No one should be proud of that pun, it's awful," Mel said. She changed tack, pointing to the newly opened 'C' at the top of the board. "You had to have something you could've put on that triple word score."

"Nothing interesting."

Mel pushed an errant red curl off her forehead and rubbed at her temple, wondering again why she'd thought Scrabble was a good idea. "You don't get extra points the more obscure your words are, you know."

"Hm? What?" The Doctor rearranged and un-rearranged the letters on his rack, distracted.

"You should be playing each turn to maximize your score," Mel addressed the top of his head as he set at his tiles again. "It's not a perfect solution, but I think greedy algorithms work best for this game."

He didn't look up. "Write all the plebeian phonemes you like. You can't fault me for preferring to play with a certain panache."

Mel rolled her eyes. "I'll consider it a handicap."

"I'll have you know, I can extrapolate any number of moves ahead in full sets of possibilities and probabilities with exponentially increasing complexity and maximization of any cost function I care to choose."

"I'll wager you can," she said. "But I'll also wager you don't."

The Doctor stopped his reflexive tile-arranging and examined his letter rack.

A E I O Y L L

"I have a plan," he said.
---


I also have a soft spot for Eleven and Craig in Sage Advice:
--
"And is that young Alfie?" the Doctor asked, pointing.

Craig sighed. "He's in his bedroom. Sulking, because everyone else's dad is letting them keep the weird black cubes."

"Everyone else's. . . " The Doctor looked back at the baby. "That's not Alfie?"

"Wearing a dress," Craig pointed out.

"Hidden mostly behind that bib there," argued the Doctor. "The one that says--"

"Daddy's girl?" Craig interrupted.

The sonic whirred. "That's--"

"That's Frankie."

"Now, hang on, you just said--!"

"Francesca," said Sophie. She hitched the baby further up on her hip, and helped her wave her tiny hand. "Say hello to the Doctor, Frankie."

Realization dawned, and the Doctor beamed. He tapped his nose with the sonic, tossed it end over end before catching it and pocketing it. "Six billion, four hundred thousand and twenty eight!" he said with a grin.

Frankie beamed back and blew a raspberry. The Doctor raised his eyebrows.

"Oh really?" he said, and turned to Craig. "You know she prefers to be called Princess Crystal, Queen of the Unicorns?"
--


And the first scene from Folsom Prison Blues, especially:
--
Daniel, still hesitant, met Jack's eyes with a questioning glance.

"She's fine," Jack said. "You saw amulets?"

Reassured, Daniel continued the lecture. "Round medallions with Talmudic etchings, wards against witchcraft. Both the priesthood and the commoners had them around their necks, though I imagine that the literacy needed to inscribe one is relegated only to the ruling class. While it seems the Goa'uld herself has long abandoned the planet, the people are still ill-educated, mistrustful and highly superstitious. If we could just explain to them that we're not their enemy--"

"Oh, I think we're a little past that stage," Jack said.

"But we need--"

"Fiery death, Daniel!"

Daniel's shoulders sagged. "Right. We need to get out of here, first."
--

[clocketpatch]

JJ got to number 10 before me so I'll say... number 5?

[eve11]

Two I'm especially proud of:

Moondance which is a little post-ep for Loups-Garoux that I wrote for fandom stocking 2009.

And The Wind's Will, which, wow, I wrote nearly 6 years ago:

---
"I'm sure I was better at this, once," the Doctor says, staring up at the black, star-specked sky.

Really, he doesn't mind the fall. This expanse of cold, entropic space at his back is just what he needs. Sky above, sky below; the mineral ice is clear as glass. The only break is from the distant bluish snowdrifts, winds hollowing out the space underneath the tips until they look like waves about to break. And if he closes his eyes...

Rage. Burning, screaming--

"--long has it been?"

The white heat disappears as his eyes snap open. The stars are just stars, just pinpricks in the black.

"Hmm?" His brain catches up with his ears as he drums the fingers of his free hand against the ice. His fingertips haven't yet stopped buzzing and throbbing, like a colony of electric ants have fled the rest of his body and are pooling there, itching to get out. He blinks again, setting off a fraction of a firestorm behind his lids, and processes the context of Martha's question. Ice skating. How long--?

"Oh, centuries," he answers absently. "Must be."
---

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

3!

[eve11]

Plot is weird, because I rarely start something without knowing where it is going, and I don't write things that are very long, in general.

Veil was the hardest for me in terms of plot, that has so far as yet gotten finished. It took me a while to figure out how to get me to write the story in my head; I had little time for a ficathon deadline and it wanted to be an epic tale.

My prompt from tripoli was: Offworld, secret societies, the Uncanny Valley. After I emailed the ficathon owners back with "Okay, I can do that" It was either nandamai or poohmusings who emailed me back with something to the effect of "Oh thank God! We were a little worried about tripoli and her robots." I think this story was actually harder to pin down than the plot of either of my two long X-files stories.

In Who fic: the current WIP gave me some fits and starts, but about 18 months ago now I wrote down an outline of all the scenes left to write, and although it is taking me longer than anticipated, I'm basically still following the outline. This next section that I'm writing though, is probably one of the trickier things I've had to plot out. which is why it is taking me on the order of 6 months, *sigh*

The other plotty one would be Walks Through Walls which I ended up writing all out of order: first the end, then the beginning and lastly the middle.